McCain warned on race card

They wheeled George Wallace in backwards and then lifted him onto a seat behind his bullet-proof lectern. Confetti, thrown by little girls in straw hats, caught in his swept-back hair. Wallace waved to the crowd.

We were in Southie — South Boston — in February 1976, and Wallace was running for president. Five hundred people were packed into a small hall, and 300 more waited outside in the cold.

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Wallace had been shot and paralyzed in Laurel, Md., during the presidential primary in 1972. A lot of people remember that. But not everyone remembers that he also won the Maryland primary that year, just like he won primaries in Michigan, Florida, Tennessee and North Carolina.

People also forget just how popular his segregationist message was. In 1964, when he had been governor of Alabama for less than a year, Wallace ran for president against Lyndon Johnson, a sitting president, and Wallace almost defeated him in Democratic primaries in Wisconsin, Indiana and Maryland.

Wallace’s appeal became known as “white backlash.” In 1968, Wallace ran for president as a third-party candidate and not only got 10 million votes, but he won Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi.

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Now, he was in Southie, where a few nights before, police and anti-busing protesters had clashed once again. Forty police officers and 20 protesters went to the hospital. Wallace was not cowed. He spoke for an hour in a strong, resonant voice.

“You will be the kings and queens of American politics!” he promised the crowd. “You! The working men and women will be the kings and queens, instead of the ultra-liberal left that has been getting everything all the time!”

(I am not depending on my memory here. I still have the yellowed, newsprint copy of my column from that night. It was one of the first columns I ever wrote.)

Wallace spoke out against busing, about media “propaganda” and ended with an ominous joke. I think it was a joke, anyway.

“There were two men in a bar,” Wallace said. “Big guy and a little guy. The big guy hits the little guy with one big hand and says, ‘That’s karate. I got it from Korea.’

“Then the big guy picks up the little guy and throws him all around. He says to the little guy, ‘That’s judo. I got it from Japan.’